In this episode of Money Files, I share more about my background and what inspired me to not only start my business, but to continue to build wealth throughout my life. I am a first generation college graduate. My parents supported and blessed me with the opportunity to follow my educational and career dreams. At a young age, I recognized I did not want money to be an obstacle in my life.
A friend of mine recently asked, “Why do you want to be rich?” For me, that answer lies within my values of community and family. My purpose in building wealth and in building my business is to create bigger and better opportunities for future generations. My vision with my money is to use it to create change. I want to develop generational wealth and influence so that my nieces and nephews have a better starting spot in their adult lives than I did. I am passionate about education and helping underserved communities. Whether this passion evolves into a nonprofit, or building an organization, I just know that the core reason I want to be rich is to help others and help my community.
Money is an excellent resource. But the vision behind wealth is just as important as the money itself. I hope that hearing about my life experiences and my goals inspires you to step out of the place you are in now. I challenge you to dream and shift your perspective. Working with a coach is a great first step to get on the path to obtaining that dream. While you listen to this episode, I want you to think about your own values and why being rich is important to you. Get inspired and start the work towards building your future and dreaming bigger.
In this episode I challenge you…
[00:18:56] I just want you to sit with that question: why do you want to be rich? Why do you want to be wealthy and get clear on that picture for yourself
[00:24:23] I want you to choose something this week that scares you. I need you to do it.
Tune in to this episode of Money Files to hear a bit about my money story and my purpose for building wealth.
Are you ready to shift your relationship with money? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
IF YOU LOVED THIS CONVERSATION ON 2023’S BIGGEST QUESTION: WHY DO YOU WANT TO BE RICH?, CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON HOW TO DETERMINE YOUR PAYCHECK AS AN ENTREPRENEUR!
Transcript for “2023’s Biggest Question: Why Do You Want To Be Rich?”
Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So today I have two to-dos for you, besides the ones that you’re going to get in the episode today, but two to-dos. First, if you are listening to this and you are listening on Apple, will you open up your Apple app? Go down to where you can leave a rating and a review. If you will do that, that would make me very happy. I just love hearing from people that are listening to the podcast. I love talking about money, but more importantly, I love to know how people are being influenced and impacted by new thoughts about their finances. So if you’ll go and leave a rating and a review, I will be eternally grateful.
And number two, in February I am going to be doing a money class. Three keys to drama-free spending. So if you want to be able to spend money as a six-figure earner without drama, without guilt, without shame, without overwhelm, without worrying about whether or not you got money in the bank because you know you have money available, then you are going to want to come to my money Class, Three keys to Drama Free Spending. It is going to be February 15th at 12:30 PM. So if you go to www.wealthovernow.com/masterclass, you can register there or you can also go to the show notes and register in the link in my show notes. So I am excited to see you at this money class and also invite your friends. We all need to be spending money drama free in 2023.
So today I wanted to talk to you and let you inside of a conversation that I had at brunch with one of my friends and she asked me this question that I’m actually going to ask you to ask yourself. So you can even press pause or you can answer the question at the end of this. But she asked me, Keina, why do you want to be rich? And for some of you, your body may have shifted or have changed, but I knew the exact reason why I want to increase my own wealth, why generating wealth is really important to me.
And for those of you who may not know parts of my story, I’m going to share some parts of my story, but I’m a first generation college graduate and I know a lot of you who are listening may be able to relate to being the first. And there are a lot of different things that can come after the title, the first. But when I think about how I grew up, when I think about my family, I really think about how my parents who didn’t go to college, my mom was a stay-at-home mom because she really wanted to make sure that she was able to be with us, like be home when we came home from school. She wanted to be able to make sure that she could see us get on the school bus. Like those things were really important for her.
And so my family lived off of a single family income, but my dad was enlisted in the military and as a kid I didn’t necessarily know that we didn’t have like a lot of money, but my parents budgeted really well and they budgeted well so that they could live off of one income, so my mom could stay at home with us. When I was about in the third grade, my mom did go back to work, she went back to work at a school and so she worked from the middle of my elementary school years on. But when I thought about like even to this day when I think about my parents, I think about the fact that my parents made a lot of sacrifices for me to be able to have opportunities.
Anytime that I feel like I had an idea or I’m laughing right now because one of my little neighbor kids, he’s always like, auntie Kiena, is this a good idea? So I can hear his voice saying, is this a good idea? But whenever I had an idea, my parents supported me wholeheartedly. I got to study abroad in high school. My mom and dad made sure that my little fundraising techniques. I think some of it was babysitting money. The other part was basically like canvassing the neighborhood and mailing out letters to be like, hey, this is what I’m doing, will you support me? But I got to study abroad. I am thinking about lemonade stands that I built or I’m also thinking about when I was in fourth grade I had business cards printed that said I’m a babysitter and I passed those out so I could build my babysitting business.
And so my parents have always supported me up until even the point now when I decided to go into business for myself and they were like, Keina, but you need a job. But they still wholeheartedly supported me in my decision to quit and understood that I wanted to build something bigger than myself. And so for me as a child of Darlene and Lee Newell, it was always important for me to take what they have given me and build upon it. But then if I think about one generation back and I think about my grandmother’s and I know my mom’s grandmother more than I know my dad’s mother, or excuse me, I know my mom’s mom, which is my granny. I know her more than I know my dad’s mom, which I call my grandmother. And that’s just by way of the fact that we moved to Oklahoma when my dad was set to retire from the military. So I got to spend a lot of time with my granny and growing up with her and doing a lot of things.
But my granny’s story, when I think about the fact that she was born in 1936 and her life has been something in some ways that I can’t fathom, like she’s cleaned people’s homes, she didn’t finish high school, but like my grandmother is one of the hardest working greediest people that I know and I admire her for everything that she’s done. She has four kids and I think she was 19 when she had my mother. I mean she just did everything that she could to make sure that like my mom and my aunts and my uncle had the best life that they possibly could. And so I have seen all of these people in my life and people in my family that I don’t know, like if we talk about going back generations. So I’ve seen these people build and I’ve seen them sacrifice.
And so when I think about my own life, I want to be a reflection of their hard work and that is a strong, my strong sense of like why I do what I do and why I show up where I show up. And that’s even before. The reason you’re hearing my voice right now is because there are a lot of other things that I’ve done before I’ve gotten to this point but graduated high school and I just remember wanting, I’ve always had really big dreams. I was the kid if you had to ask me in high school I was going to be a pediatrician. By way of being a pediatrician, I wanted to own my own practice but I was always thinking about building something that was bigger than myself and that was important to me and that was important to me because it’s not just about me but it’s about being able to have a generational impact and a generational influence.
I ended up going to college, went to the University of Tulsa. I decided I wasn’t going to be a doctor because I was not going to stay in the library and study all the time. But I was like okay, well maybe I can do healthcare administration and started to explore different things. But ultimately the thing that I always knew I wanted to do is I wanted to be able to be in a field where I could have impact. Being able to impact and influence other people was important to me because giving back to my community has always been something that has been important to me. So I started thinking about healthcare administration but ultimately ended up joining Teach for America and I became a teacher, I moved to St. Louis. But that’s really, I feel like in terms of why you’re hearing my voice right now and where my story begins, like so much of it begins there especially when I think about money.
When I went to college I didn’t think about taking out student loans because I was going to be a doctor and I was going to be rich. At the time a hundred thousand dollars sounded like a lot of money. And so to take out $20,000, $25,000 a year to get a college education, that didn’t seem like a big deal. My parents didn’t know a lot about student loans and so I got into student loan debt thinking no one would give me money that I couldn’t pay back and like just wouldn’t make sense. But when I graduated college and I decided to do Teach for America, I remember that I had accepted a job in the oil and gas industry. So I have a degree in management and finance and I had accepted a job in the oil and gas industry and that job at the time I would’ve been making $55,000 a year.
But I decided to tell them that I would no longer be taking that role and I decided to go and join Teach for America and accept a role as a middle school math teacher and I was making about $30,000 a year. So you don’t need to be really good at math to know that there was a difference in what I was going to be paid. And I remember my concern at the time was would I be able to pay my bills? And I didn’t want to have to sacrifice something that I was passionate about because of money. I didn’t want money to get in the way. And so I literally remember at the age of 21 having a conversation with an individual about like, so tell me how this money is going to work out so I can pay my rent, my student loans and I can have the opportunity to save.
And I ultimately decided to go ahead and teach and I had over $70,000 worth of student loan debt and I was making $30,000 a year. But I really started to focus on my numbers at that point because there were like goals that I wanted to achieve. I wanted to own a home, I wanted to be able to travel and I didn’t know how I could do that with the amount of money that I was making. And if you fast forward, I made a strategic move after I did Teach for America because I decided I still wanted to teach. I enjoyed teaching and being able to give back in the community by way of being an example of what was possible for my students. And so what I ended up doing was I moved to DC and in DC I was making $55,000 a year.
So I knew I wanted to make more money, I got the more money piece, I’m still working on my numbers, trying to figure things out, also using my credit card. And when I moved to DC the rent was more, so there’s really high cost of living. It was like triple basically of what I was paying in St. Louis and then I was able, I could only save, like I want to say it was maybe like $50 a month, maybe $25 per paycheck. And so I at the time was like, I just still just like didn’t want to give up something I was passionate about because of money. And so I went to work to try to like figure out like what are the numbers, how can I make this make sense? And the reason that I’m sharing all of this with you is just like when I think about where I started to where I am now, like I’m amazed at how all of the pieces have fallen into place for my life.
And in some ways I don’t need to be amazed because I think God has like ordained every single step that I’ve taken. But when I think about the question that my friend answered, like why do you want to be rich? Or the question that she asked me, excuse me. The reason I want to be rich is because I want to be able to provide access and I want to be able to provide opportunities and I want the access to be for those people in my family. I have a lot of nieces and nephews. My brothers both have kids and I want them to have access. I want them to have opportunities, I want them to have access and opportunities that I’ve never had. And when I think about my value of community. I want to be someone who has the money to give someone else access, to give someone else opportunity.
Like making more money isn’t really just about me. Being rich or being wealthy isn’t just about me. It’s about being able to be attached to influence. And so I can use money in a way to be able to support other people. Like that is very, very important to me. One of the things that I am passionate about because I was in education is thinking about how I can build in ways that allow me to still support the students that I worked with for over a decade in systemic ways and thinking about how do I support organizations. I don’t know if I’ll have a nonprofit one day, but thinking about how I can support the systemic issues that impact the underserved communities that I worked in. So one of the things that I oftentimes think about is as a teacher when I was working in underserved communities, how incarceration, like impacted our students’ lives.
And when I think about that structure in society, when I think about incarceration and there not being an opportunity for rehabilitation and making sure that if you were 15 and you were incarcerated for drugs and you didn’t get out until you were 30 and then when you come back to the community, the thing that you don’t have an opportunity to excel because someone may not want to offer you a job or give you a chance. And so then you get back into a situation where you’re selling drugs again, which then puts you back into the prison system. I am passionate about finding ways to stop that cycle. And so I think about if I have money, not only do I have voice and a passion, but money also can create change. So that’s one thing I think about when I think about having more money.
Something else that I think about and I’m sharing with my friend as we were at brunches, I own a home in DC. Despite my story earlier that I shared with you, I was able to buy a home before I was 30 and I still had some student loan debt, but despite being in debt, I was able to buy a house. And I was thinking about, and I had this conversation with my mom recently, I said, I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe I keep my house and I’ll be able to rent it out. But I was thinking about my nieces and nephews, I said, how cool would it be if in 15 years from now one of my nieces and nephews is like, auntie Keina, I’m going to go to Howard or Auntie Keina, I’m coming to GW Law or whatever it may be.
And because I have a home in DC they can live in my house. They would still have to pay rent because I’m going to teach them to be responsible. But for them to have somewhere to land and to give them an opportunity to excel, that they may not have had, had their auntie not been in a position to build wealth. And so when I think about my own numbers, it’s about building something that is bigger than me. I love nice things, I love to spend money, but it’s not just about being able to travel or being able to go out to eat or being able to get a manicure and a pedicure. Like for me, when I think about money and I think about my legacy and I’m thinking about like how do I create a mark in my family that allows the next generation to experience something different.
I also think about putting myself in a financial situation where my parents who are well taken care of right now, but if anything were to happen to them that I’ll be financially positioned to be able to take care of them. I think about extending that same opportunity. Like I think about my friends, like we’re all in the same life cycles, we’re all in the same life seasons together. But if I have money then there are issues that I can help them solve so they can be more present in their lives and in their own circumstances because I have money, because I’ve managed my money well. And when I talk about having money, I also think about the fact like there’s a difference between me having money and then also me having like the vision that goes along with the money because I think there can be people listening to me right now like you have money but maybe you don’t have the vision that goes with it.
And so just being able to think about like why do you want to have wealth? Like what does that wealth mean in your life? What does the purpose of money in your life, what would you like someone to say about you at your funeral essentially. Or like what are people saying at the water cooler at work if they were thinking about how you showed up in the world. And really just thinking about what values you have when you think about money and how money can impact not only you but other people around you. So as you enter into 2023, I know we’re a couple weeks in, I just want you to sit with that question like why do you want to be rich? Why do you want to be wealthy? And get clear on that picture for yourself.
The other thing that I want to say in this episode, and I am literally just like talking off the top of my head, I don’t have a single note, but on January 15th I celebrated my second anniversary, if you will, of leaving my full-time job. So in the beginning I was building my business with like some contract work. I was doing contract work on the side, then I was working on full-time job on the side and on Facebook popped up, that it was my like two year anniversary of quitting my job. And so I was thinking about that because quitting my job has been one of the best decisions that I’ve ever made. And one of the questions that has always driven me in life is and it’s a question slash quote I should say. It was even on my clipboard as a teacher, is what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? And try to ask that question my entire life and live in that vein. It’s why I even like join Teach for America. I just wanted to see what would it be like to teach.
I knew that I could always go back and get the oil and gas job because I was degree wise, well qualified. And even when I thought about quitting my full-time job, going into business for myself, I was like, yeah, I want to do this because at the end of the day I know that I can go and be a principal at any school. Like there’s always going to be a job for me there, but here’s this other territory that I haven’t stepped into and I want to step into this territory because I’m so curious what’s available to me over here. And when I think about like the question, what would you attempt to do if you could not fail? What also comes to mind is that I don’t ever want to wonder what if. What if I had not done, fill in the blank. And so Teach for America, quitting my job, buying a house. Like those are all things that are really inspired by thinking about what would I do if I wasn’t afraid of failure?
And I don’t want to miss this moment in life and wish that I had done something differently. And the reason I wanted to talk about this on this episode as well is because I was thinking about the power that entrepreneurship has had for me. I think I’ve always been very inspired by different people in my life. I’ve been inspired by situations in my life. When I started organizations in high school, I started organizations in college. Like I was always looking to solve a solution. I’m telling you I’m recording off the top of my head. I was always looking to solve a problem and provide a solution. And so when I think about entrepreneurship fueled something in me that I hadn’t felt in a long time.
And that was the permission to like be creative, the permission to be inspired. And I want you to know that, maybe you’ve been thinking about like as I’ve been talking today, Keina, I don’t know if I can make more money or Keina, I am stuck in a rot. I want to just invite you to change your container. You know how like an animal, like I think about like a fish tank, like if you had like little goldfish, you can keep them in the little like Ziploc bag or little baggy that they come from the store in. But then you have to like put them in a bigger bowl and depending on what type of fish it is, you may have to put them in an even bigger bowl. Like you have to change the container. And so I would just challenge you to think about what container you’re in.
I think a lot of us have a tendency to remain stuck, to remain stagnant and to remain comfortable. And you can’t change if you’re in the same container. Entrepreneurship has shifted me outside of my comfort zone. Entrepreneurship has made me think about doing things that I never would’ve done. The fact that you’re hearing my voice on a podcast, girl, I’m telling you, if you had said Keina, you have a podcast, like five years ago I would’ve looked at you like you were crazy. And I roll my eyes and went on about my way. But by way of entrepreneurship I’ve been challenged and by being challenged, like my brain thinks about different things. And so if you’re stuck on the question of like, what would being rich afford me? What would being wealthy afford me? If you’re stuck on that question, you need to change your container.
You need to dream bigger. It’s important to dream bigger. And you don’t need to solve your dreams. You just need to dream. Your brain will solve the dreams. Your brain may even change the dreams. But when you’re dreaming, you are going to be moving forward because you’re going to be taking action towards something that’s bigger than you. And I want you to be taking action. Don’t stay small because of the fact that you’re in a small container. So look around, I want you to choose something this week that scares you. I need you to do it. Maybe that’s something that scares you, is like, whew, girl, I’m going to work with Keina. Yes, let’s go. Like I want you to be scared and it’s a healthy amount of fear, right? I don’t want you to just be scared for the sake of being scared, but put yourself in a different container.
Working with a coach is going to put yourself in a different container. Like that’s what I’ve done multiple times, is work with a coach and understand the power of coaching because that person, you can tell them about your dreams and your secrets and they get to hold your dreams and your secrets and they get to help you create a path to whatever you’re trying to create.
So that’s the episode for today. I know I jumped around a little bit, but I just wanted to record that because my friend was like, you need to tell more people about like, why you got started and give you some background. So just know, like this year, one of my goals is to really build. I want to build on my business. I want to build on my life. I am still working out what all of those intentions will be, but I’m working on some things in the background and I will share, like I said, more as those come to pass. But I would just invite you to dream because dreaming is the thing that’s going to propel you forward. And then make sure that you are grounded in whatever your purpose is and what is your why for wanting to create more.
So thank you for tuning into another episode of Money Files. And if you didn’t follow the two steps that I told you to at the beginning of this episode, go back, leave a review if you’re listening on Apple and rate this podcast. Number two, sign up for three keys to drama free spending. It’s going to be February 15th at 12:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. And you can go into the show notes to register. So I will talk to you later and have a fabulous week.
Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
